3:54 PM, March 5, 2014

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson seen during the Detroit Economic Club's Big Four luncheon held in the Cobo ballroom during the 2014 North American International Auto Show in Detroit on Thursday, Jan. 16, 2014. / Kimberly P. Mitchell/Detroit Free Press

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Since the New Yorker magazine published its profile of a barbed-tongued L. Brooks Patterson, Oakland County’s top official has spent the last six weeks back-pedaling and apologizing — to Detroiters, to Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, to all regional leaders offended by his Detroit-bashing rhetoric.

At the annual meeting of the United Tribes of Michigan, scores of leaders from 12 tribes around the state listened to an apology letter from Patterson.

“I apologize for my ignorance of history, and I want you to know that it was never my intent to disrespect Native Americans. I hope that my record shows that I have been a longtime supporter of the Native American community and that I have nothing but the greatest respect for your culture and history,” the letter said.

The apology was well-received.

“I personally believe that his apology was genuine, and it was received that way,” said Matt Wesaw, former tribal chairman for the Pokagon band of the Potawatomi Indians and executive director of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.

The Pokagon band numbers about 5,000 members mainly in four counties of southwest Michigan, Wesaw said.

Wesaw, a retired Michigan State Police trooper, read the letter from Patterson at the annual meeting. Patterson wrote it meeting with Wesaw — at Wesaw’s request — on Jan. 30, a few days after the article was published.

“Brooks has done some good things in the Native American community, which made me think he really didn’t know what he was saying” when he spoke to the writer, Wesaw said.

Patterson’s remark, which he retold to the New Yorker writer from a Free Press interview conducted more than three decades ago, compared the predicament of Detroiters’ spiraling poverty to a scenario of “herding Indians behind a wall and throwing them blankets and corn.”

Patterson declined to comment this week on his apology letter, which he feels speaks for itself, spokesman Bill Mullan said.

“Talking about throwing blankets to Indians — the history there is that they were a lot of times infected with smallpox by the early settlers” to spread the disease, which often was fatal to Indians because they had little immunity to diseases of European origin, Wesaw said.

After hearing that from Wesaw, Patterson wrote in his letter: “I was unaware of the entire sordid episode of Native Americans facing extinction through the imposition of disease-filled blankets.”

Wesaw met with Patterson as an individual, although state civil rights officials were aware of the article and had received two complaints about it from Indians — one in Washtenaw County and one in Branch County, said Vicki Levengood, communications director for the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.

Along with his letter, addressed to the United Tribes of Michigan as well as to Wesaw, Patterson enclosed 15 copies of a $20 Indian poster, produced by Oakland County artists as part of the county’s Heritage Map and Poster Series.

The 36-by-42-inch poster, produced with materials lent by Cranbrook Institute of Science from its collection of prehistoric artifacts, depicts historic sites in the county related to Indian history and reproduces the teachings of local tribes, said Kristen Wiltfgang, an Oakland County senior planner who coordinated the artwork.

The map, created in consultation with the Southeastern Michigan Indians organization, was presented “to the elders several years ago actually at a powwow at Groveland Oaks,” a county park in Holly Township, Wiltfang said.